THE QUESTION:
Sometimes we are asked questions to which it is really hard to give an answer: how does a blind person perceive reality?
THE ANSWER
The answer to this question is basically a philosophical one, we can only say a little about visual perception from the point of view of the traditional optics.
Since this patient has never had any “visual experience”, he will never be able to represent “reality” as a sighted person does. It is possible that shapes and colors may have a “sense” to him/her, but surely not the one we mean. To better understand (maybe) what we are saying, it may help to think about this question: how can I communicate the “concept” of a colour to a person who has never seen it?
I asked a blind person once this exact question for a study i was doing at university. They said they see colours as numbers on a range of 1 to 10, for instance blue being a 1 and red being a 9.